125 articles
WHILE DEMONSTRATIONS for and against Israel, the Palestinians, and Jean-Marie Le Pen were hogging the headlines last week, a quintessentially American flap was unfolding in Chester County, Pennsylvania. There, a crowd reportedly reaching 350 gathered in "boisterous" protest as a work crew affixed a…
CONCERNING SAUDI ARABIA, whose de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah, visited Crawford last week, let's start with a multiple-choice question.
Atonement by Ian McEwan Doubleday, 351 pp., $26 IN 1971, at age twenty-two, Ian McEwan was Malcolm Bradbury's first student in a new master's degree program at the University of East Anglia in England--in what was then the very American subject of "creative writing." Indeed, East Anglia's program…
WHY WERE WE WORRIED about Secretary of State Colin Powell's trip to the Middle East? After all, for one crucial week, Powell ended up providing diplomatic cover for an ongoing Israeli military operation that has made significant strides against the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian…
IT HAS RAPIDLY BECOME accepted wisdom in Washington that the United States is in ever-worsening trouble in the Arab Middle East. The collapse of the peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians has, according to this zeitgeist, left America bereft of friendly Muslims in the region,…
PRESIDENT BUSH has trouble concealing his sympathy for Israel. When White House aides suggested Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as Bush's personal representative to address the pro-Israel rally in Washington on April 15, the president responded without hesitation. He could have had a…
CALL ME Jack Kerouac. I'm sitting in the Billy Goat Tavern in Chicago writing stream of consciousness-style while memories of my past pretensions flow back to me. The Billy Goat is under Michigan Avenue between the Chicago Tribune building and the Sun-Times building. It became famous when John…
HERE'S A GOOD ONE: Liberals are now whining about media bias. It took the form of an April 12 letter to the heads of CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. "We are writing to bring to your attention an issue that has become more pronounced in recent months: the lack of television coverage of press events…
IF THE UNITED STATES moves against Iraq, what attitude should it expect from neighboring Iran? Unfortunately, given improvements in Tehran-Baghdad relations, the considerable influence Tehran exerts over Iraqi opposition groups, and continuing poor relations between Tehran and Washington, the…
EUROPE ISN'T HOPELESS It's depressingly true that practically every European paper of note last week decided to "report" on the pitched urban warfare in Jenin between the Israeli Defense Force and Palestinian terrorists and fighters as if what had taken place there were a "massacre" by ruthless…
Master of the Senate The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro Knopf, 1,167 pp., $35 IT HAS BEEN twelve years since publication of "Means of Ascent," the second volume of Robert Caro's "The Years of Lyndon Johnson," but the long-anticipated third volume, "Master of the Senate," is worth the…
BEHIND THE PHYSICAL ATTACK on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was an intellectual attack--an assault not just on American foreign policy but on the principle of freedom. So far the Bush administration's military response has been quite effective against the al Qaeda network. But our…
GAZA IN THE COMING DAYS, President Bush will send CIA director George Tenet to Gaza and the West Bank to assess the capacity of the ravaged Palestinian security services to prevent the suicide bombings that have made everyday life perilous for Israelis. Tenet and other CIA men on the ground in the…
1) OVER THE PAST SIX MONTHS, have federal authorities altered their working theory of last fall's anthrax murders? No, not much. On November 9 last year, even before the anthrax outbreak's fifth and final fatality had been recorded, the FBI called a press conference to unveil its "linguistic and…
Tilting the Playing Field Schools, Sports, Sex and Title IX by Jessica Gavora Encounter, 182 pp., $24.95 TITLE IX, passed by Congress thirty years ago, states simply a non-discrimination policy concerning sex: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from…
Our Posthuman Future Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis Fukuyama Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pp., $25 FRANCIS FUKUYAMA is right, of course, when he says in his new book, "Our Posthuman Future," that we should be frightened by the Brave New World that eugenic biotechnology…
IN THE MIDDLE EAST, reality intrudes rather quickly. The dreams of diplomats are regularly blown to pieces by bombings and bullets. Elsewhere, reality sometimes takes longer to penetrate. This is especially so in the European Union, which has now displaced U.N. headquarters as the global center of…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Put a Lid on It by Donald E. Westlake (Mysterious, 247 pp., $23.95) Westlake has entered new territory--presidential politics--with typically Westlakeian results. A judicious mix of satire and Westlake's trademark comedy of criminals, "Put a Lid on It" tells what happens when an…
A FEW WEEKS AGO I wrote about America's need to remember the heroes of Flight 93. At the local level, a handful of places have made moves to memorialize Flight 93 and at the federal level, Rep. Jack Murtha is trying to create a national memorial, although when I spoke with his press secretary, he…
"GOOD MORNING, everybody. Tomorrow the House is planning to take up legislation to raid the Social Security trust fund of $400 billion for another tax cut."
BONIFACISME Last August, Pascal Boniface, a top foreign policy adviser to Lionel Jospin, wrote an open "Letter to an Israeli Friend" that appeared in Le Monde. The echo of the "Letters to a German Friend" that Albert Camus had written in 1943 and 1944 was not lost on Jewish readers. The lawyer…
What was the point of Saudi crown prince Abdullah's trip to Crawford, Texas? Nothing substantial emerged from the so-called summit. The Arabian oil autocrat said nothing at the end of his meeting with President Bush. No new guidelines for the Saudis' increasingly overdue investigation of their…
THE LINEUP on ABC last night was a grim treat. Like some awful before-and-after comparison, a show about hot young singles was followed by a show about ill-dressed, unhappy married people. The former was a reality game show, "The Bachelor," in which twenty-five young, attractive women with few…
I WAS STRUCK BY a little story in the local section of the Washington Post. The Prince William County, Virginia, School Board has just completed construction on a new school and they had to figure out what to call it. Four thousand local people signed a petition saying it should be named after Jeff…
ON THE EVE of his meeting with President Bush today, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia warned of "a strategic debacle" that could result in the Saudis employing "the oil weapon" against the United States and demanding that U.S. forces leave their bases in the Kingdom. Although the ostensible…
WHEN IS A CLONE not a clone, and an embryo not an embryo? When the biotech lobby wants to persuade Americans that creating a cloned embryo and then destroying it for the sake of medical experimentation should be allowed.
PALESTINIAN and other apologists for Yasser Arafat have propagated three myths about his failure to reach peace with Israel. And only now--two years after Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed because of Arafat's intransigence--is the truth becoming known. This is mostly thanks to Dennis Ross,…
IT ALL STARTED with an invitation to a dinner at the home of the Cypriot ambassador. It's not everyday one gets to go to an ambassador's house, so how could I refuse? Of course, I'm not one to pass up on fine dining no matter where or for what reason. In fact, I supped at the Iraqi mission last…
FORTY YEARS AGO, President John Kennedy got his first chance to name a Supreme Court justice when Charles Whittaker, a lackluster Eisenhower appointee worn out after only five years of service, announced his resignation. On April 3, 1962, Kennedy nominated his deputy attorney general, the famous…
AROUND 1830, a group of French artists and intellectuals looked around and noticed that people who were their spiritual inferiors were running the world. Suddenly a large crowd of merchants, managers, and traders were making lots of money, living in the big houses, and holding the key posts. They…
WE ARE ALREADY more than a week into Europe's boycott of the Austrian government, but the Sturm und Drang show no sign of blowing over. For one, all 14 of the European Union members who have frozen high-level bilateral contacts with Austria now face a whole series of deeply traumatic protocol…
AS WE ALWAYS SAID growing up in New Jersey, you can take the boy out of the mall, but you can't take the mall out of the boy. My youth was misspent playing hours of Street Fighter in arcades, punctuated by runs to the Cookie Factory and other fine food court eateries. This has left me susceptible…
A Legacy by Sybille Bedford Counterpoint, 320 pp., $15 A Favourite of the Gods by Sybille Bedford Counterpoint, 320 pp., $16 A Compass Error by Sybille Bedford Counterpoint, 240 pp., $16 Jigsaw An Unsentimental Education by Sybille Bedford Counterpoint, 320 pp., $15 SYBILLE BEDFORD: The name rings…
ANYONE TEMPTED TO DISMISS the slavery reparations movement should take a look at Cincinnati. A year after rioters beat white drivers and burned and looted businesses, their spokesmen have shaken down the city for tens of millions of dollars in social spending and police monitoring mechanisms. And…
WITH THE EXCEPTION of air and perhaps water, no substance known to man is less in need of marketing than food. Everyone eats. That fact hasn't stopped Congress from setting aside $484,000 for the Food Marketing Policy Center in Storrs, Connecticut. Indeed, that sum is just the latest in an ongoing…
ISRAEL IS IN BIG TROUBLE with nearly the whole enlightened world--European "peace activists" and Arab diplomats and Zbigniew Brzezinski and all sorts of mainstream American journalists--for not allowing Palestinian terrorists to kill its citizens with impunity. The Europeans rushed to the West Bank…
SIX MONTHS after establishing the Office of Homeland Security, President Bush praised its head, former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, for his service in a March 27 speech in South Carolina. Ridge's mission is a huge one: "to develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national…
THE FIRST TIME I recall seeing Jesus, I was in Mrs. Schlaeger's K-4 class at Mt. Olive Lutheran School. My family wasn't Lutheran, but they decided I could pass. As a preschooler, I did my best impression of being a cool customer. I made miracles out of Tinkertoys, and cut a dashing figure in…
LONDON THINKING OF VISITING London? Great idea. Airfares are low, the weather is fine, the chance of contracting mad cow disease has fallen from infinitesimal to zero, and the talented British actors tread the boards of the West End and National theaters with their usual skill and verve. But leave…
RIGHT NOW the Bush administration seems to be lost in the wilderness without a moral or strategic compass. This is a stunning development, for less than three months ago the president set forth a grand and clear vision for American foreign policy. We would fight terrorism and the regimes that…
The Monks of Tibhirine Faith, Love and Terror in Algeria by John W. Kiser St. Martin's, 335 pp., $25.95 TIBHIRINE is a village in the Atlas Mountains some forty miles southwest of Algiers. In 1938 a Trappist monastery was founded there by a small group of French monks from the Abbey of Aiguebelle.…
IN JANUARY, the President's Council on Bioethics began its first meeting with a reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "The Birthmark," a parable of a scientist's obsessive effort to remove a "crimson stain" from his wife's cheek. It is about the mad quest for perfection--the revolt against "sin,…
THE MEMBER FROM MARS Last week's Scrapbook had some harsh things to say about the virulent strain of anti-Americanism, always latent in the soil over there, that has been a-fully sporulating in France since the terrorist attacks of last fall. In particular, we noted that an amazingly stupid and…
Heaven on Earth The Rise and Fall of Socialism by Joshua Muravchik Encounter, 417 pp., $27.95 Holy Madness Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries 1776-1871 by Adam Zamoyski Viking, 512 pp., $34.95 THERE ARE TWO KINDS of radical: the consolable and the inconsolable. The consolables are those whose…
ENACTMENT OF A FULL BAN on human cloning is complicated by two dozen or more senators, roughly half of them Republicans, who wish the issue would go away. Advocates of the ban wanted to bring Leon Kass, head of President Bush's Council on Bioethics, before a meeting of Republican senators. The…
PARIS--The Monday morning newspapers were already on the streets at midnight Sunday, and so was the French left. Both were describing National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen's runner-up finish in the first round of the presidential elections as "A shock!" and "A political earthquake!" Le Pen, who…
I WAS WATCHING Greta Van Facelift on Fox the other night, and she and her guests made me talk back to the TV. Shout back, actually. Nothing witty or trenchant, you understand, just something like, "Oh, come on!" Now, to be honest, it was late, and I was downstairs alone, and I was a little, what's…
6) What's going on here? Is it Ames or isn't it? Insofar as any of them feels sure of the answer, none of the scientists now working with the government will state it unambiguously, in part because they are concerned for the security of a massive ongoing investigation. Even were security not a…
Why were we worried about Secretary of State Colin Powell's trip to the Middle East? After all, for one crucial week, Powell ended up providing diplomatic cover for an ongoing Israeli military operation that has made significant strides against the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian…
EARLIER THIS YEAR, William McGowan published an important book on how the media covers race in America. Coloring the News received a surprising number of favorable reviews. Even those who disagreed with his conclusions gave McGowan credit for his thorough reporting and his willingness to address a…
IF BUSH'S STRATEGY in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a bit muddled, so has American opinion. Although both the administration's stance and the weight of public sentiment favor Israel, they both contain surprising elements suggesting various other possibilities, most of them dreamlike.…
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ON APRIL 5 the Daily Targum, campus newspaper of Rutgers University, published a front-page report on a pro-Palestinian student rally. It quoted one protester, a fourth-year pharmacy student, as claiming that the media portray Palestinians as terrorists, "but when the Israeli government went into…
THE COUNCIL ON AMERICAN ISLAMIC RELATIONS had a poll on its website earlier this week. The query put to viewers was whether or not Ariel Sharon should be tried from war crimes. As you can imagine, the folks at CAIR regard this as an open and shut question.
ESPN recently asked Jim Morris whom he would like to invite to dinner and why. Morris included President Bush on his list, since he "has seen some things other presidents have not had to look at"--things such as what happened on September 11.
A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO I solicited your ideas and promised some of my own thoughts on how to aid and abet do-it-yourself media criticism. The response was heavy enough that I've violated my usual practice of answering every e-mail, though I have read them all now. Consider this a wholesale thank you…
THE WOMAN at the hotel front desk, who bore a name tag reading Jessica Doodle, must have got high marks in Service with a Smile class at hotel management school. She beamed at me as if I were every present under the Christmas tree, and said, "Welcome, sir, to Colonial Williamsburg!" She didn't say…
AROUND 1830, a group of French artists and intellectuals looked around and noticed that people who were their spiritual inferiors were running the world. Suddenly a large crowd of merchants, managers, and traders were making lots of money, living in the big houses, and holding the key posts. They…
HOW IS IT that the Bush administration, which is deadly serious in opposing terrorists and those who harbor them, could let Colin Powell declare last week--on the same day that senior terrorist Yasser Arafat was caught funding the Al Aksa suicide bombers--that Arafat is no terrorist at all? On…
Wittgenstein's Poker The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers by David Edmonds and John Eidinow Ecco, 352 pp., $24 LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN and Karl Popper met only once--just after World War II, when Popper addressed the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club. Popper…
WHEN FROGS ATTACK Take a minute, won't you please, to acknowledge the sufferings of a too often overlooked class of victims in this war-on-terrorism business and the associated crisis in the Middle East. We mean, of course, French political activists and intellectuals, who are stretched awfully…
THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN is a long way from over. Despite the premature self-congratulation that was common until recent weeks, we haven't won it yet, and our victory or defeat will rest largely on decisions our leaders are making now. From the beginning of the conflict, the administration has been…
The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne Modern Library, 640 pp., $23.95 ASKED to name the first parents--the Adams and the Eves--of science fiction, most literary chroniclers come up with five names: Mary Shelley (for "Frankenstein"), Edward Bulwer-Lytton (for "The Coming Race"), Edgar Allan Poe (who…
AFTER SAFIYA HUSEINI was sentenced to death by stoning last October 9 by an Islamic sharia court in northern Nigeria, her case drew international attention. The New York Times Magazine profiled her, and European members of parliament protested to Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo. When, in…
U.N. SECRETARY GENERAL Kofi Annan is happy with President Bush's apparent Middle East policy switch. So is European Union president Romano Prodi, French president Jacques Chirac, and the British foreign ministry. The New York Times editorial page is very happy. And, really, that's what American…
The Savage Wars of Peace Small Wars and the Rise of American Power by Max Boot Basic, 384 pp., $27.50 WHEN WE THINK of our wars, what come naturally to mind are the great conflicts, the landmark battles, and the intrepid names: the Revolutionary War and World War II, Gettysburg and Iwo Jima, Grant…
IN THE PAST DECADE, Broadway has been reintroduced to the work of an American dramatist whose worldwide fame never quite translated into proper respect. He was an innovator and a craftsman, and yet his name somehow became synonymous with hidebound and creaky traditions. The simplicity of his work…
PRESIDENT BUSH only looks like he's operating by the seat of his pants in Middle East policy. Actually he has a three-pronged strategy. Prong one is to give the Israelis as much time as possible for their military drive to uproot the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure. Number two is to keep some…
IN FEBRUARY 2001, after detailing a series of recent "advances" in biotechnology and genetics--genetically modified monkeys, the use of human fetal tissue in rodents, the granting of patents for "hybrid" man-animal embryos, and the harvesting of hearts, brains, and other organs from dead children…
JERUSALEM LAST MONTH IN East Jerusalem, a Harvard Ph.D. answered some of my questions fairly honestly and ducked the rest. Dr. Sari Nusseibeh comes from a very old family in the Arab part of town, comparable maybe to the Saltonstalls in Boston. For ages there've been Nusseibehs at or near the top.…
WHAT IS John Steinbeck's place in American literary history? This year marks the centenary of his birth--the fortieth anniversary of his contentious 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature--and still we're not sure what to do with him. Certainly, his three great contemporaries overshadow him. Ernest…
THE DAY THE BOOK CLUB DIED Book sales are down everywhere, review sections in newspapers across the nation are being trimmed, popular fiction hasn't met serious fiction for so long they might as well be on different planets--and now Oprah Winfrey's book club is no more. That last fact may actually…
REPORTER ALFONSO CHARDY wrote an important but little-noticed article for last Wednesday's Miami Herald. It adds to the proofs that we never got the whole story behind the Clinton administration's case for deporting 6-year-old boat person Elian Gonzalez back to Fidel Castro's Cuba. Young Elian had…
RIGHT NOW the Bush administration seems to be lost in the wilderness without a moral or strategic compass. This is a stunning development, for less than three months ago the president set forth a grand and clear vision for American foreign policy. We would fight terrorism and the regimes that…
TODAY, at a bus station near Jerusalem's Mehane Yehuda market, a suicide bomber blew himself up, killing six and wounding scores more. The Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a military wing of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, have claimed responsibility. Secretary of State Colin Powell is…
EVERYONE HAS AN OPINION about which event truly heralds the arrival of spring--baseball's opening day, the cherry trees blossoming in Washington, Easter Sunday. But for me, and doubtless for golf nuts across the land, it isn't really spring until the Masters golf tournament arrives in mid-April,…
IF YOU RELY on the American press, it is simply impossible to figure out what is going on in the West Bank. For example, in Thursday's New York Times there was an inept front page story entitled, Attacks turn Palestinian Dream Into Bent Metal and Piles of Dust. Then inside there was another story,…
YESTERDAY, in Madrid, the American Secretary of State virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists: "I think we are all in agreement and the world is in agreement that the solution will not be produced by terror or a response to terror." Quite a departure…
A WAVE of forgetfulness has engulfed the issue of Middle East turmoil between Israel and the Palestinians. Arab moderates whom Secretary of State Colin Powell visited this week, European leaders upset by Israel's conduct, the international media (including American reporters), United Nations…
IN MILITARY TERMS, Palestinian terrorists are losing badly in the current Israeli operation to destroy the terrorist infrastructure in the West Bank. Palestinian militants, far from welcoming martyrdom, as the American press insists must be the result of the Israeli offensive, are instead…
FOR THE PAST FEW YEARS, there's been talk in Germany about merging the state of Brandenburg with the city-state of Berlin (imagine a merging of Maryland and the District of Columbia, but not as bad). Most estimates expect the "fusion" of the two entities to take place by 2006. It's a reasonable…
SECRETARY OF STATE Colin Powell's trip to the Middle East is shaping up to be a disaster. Vice President Cheney's recent trip marked a detour from the Bush Doctrine; the president's recent statements pressuring Israel to stop its campaign against terrorism, a retreat; the secretary's trip so far…
"SEX CAN BE dangerous, especially when it involves toys. Wearing a three-foot, five-pound 'double dong' around his neck, Todd Wonders, a representative from Dvdadultempire.com, advised students to start small when it comes to anal penetration."
A FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION in the Middle East conflict is whether the Palestinians can be saved, not from Israel, as many of them would have it, but from themselves.
SNOW:And now it's panel time for Brit Hume and Fox News contributors Mara Liasson, national political correspondent for National Public Radio, Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and Juan Williams, national correspondent for National Public Radio. Mara, we now have Secretary of State Colin…
FEELING BUOYANT and mighty relieved by the stream of good news on the economy for the first quarter of this year, the Bush administration refuses to leave well enough alone. The White House has been issuing triumphant press releases about how the president is responsible for this apparent recovery.…
THE ARAB LEAGUE, like so much else in the Muslim Middle East, has an identity problem. Created in 1944 through British inspiration, the League was supposed to cement a hodgepodge of newly created Arab states into a postwar bulwark of British influence and power. That didn't happen. The organization…
BYRD DROPPINGS Want a laugh? Hie on over to Sen. Robert C. Byrd's official Web page--www.senate.gov/ byrd--and click the appropriately labeled "About Me" option. Then follow the link for "My Story," where you'll find what has to be the greatest example of unchecked, un-selfconscious egotism…
My Country Versus Me The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused of Being A Spy by Wen Ho Lee, with Helen Zia Hyperion, 332 pp., $23.95 A Convenient Spy Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage by Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman Simon & Schuster, 384 pp., $26 WAS…
LONDON'S Financial Times, read by more and more American businessmen, does not have a reputation for remoteness from the facts. But it is in the process of acquiring one. On March 28, the FT published a piece of terrorist propaganda under the guise of news. In an article entitled "US Muslims see…
ON THE EVIDENCE of the past couple of weeks, there's one person above all on the Bush foreign policy team whom we can trust to wage the war on terrorism effectively--without debilitating self-delusions, without crippling moral confusion, without self-defeating serpentine maneuvering, but rather…
THE FRONT LINES in the war against terror are no longer in the mountains of Afghanistan, but rather in the streets of Israel. Since America was attacked in September, both friends and adversaries of Israel have attempted to deny the link between America's war on terror and the dispute in the Middle…
HANS-GEORG GADAMER, one of the most important and influential European philosophers of the twentieth century, died on March 13 at the age of 102. The author of dozens of books and articles, he was the principal founder of hermeneutics, an approach to textual interpretation now widely practiced at…
ONE STEP FROM DEATH The Weekly Standard doesn't review much mass-market genre fiction, figuring such books manage to find readers all by themselves. But you may want to check out Dean R. Koontz's latest. Koontz is the bestselling author of such black thrillers and horror stories as "The Servants of…
JEANE KIRKPATRICK once remarked that while she was a professor of political science there were two mysteries she could not understand: how the Holocaust could have happened, and how the rest of the world could have let it happen. Things became clear once she took her post as U.S. ambassador to the…
WHEN PALESTINIAN suicide bomber Abdel-Basset Odeh, a member of the Hamas military wing known as the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, walked into the Park Hotel in Netanya on the first night of Passover last week and blew himself up along with 20 Israelis, he probably did his own family a service. The…
FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT has kicked over quite an anthill in Northern Virginia. A U.S. Treasury task force, Operation Green Quest, has been investigating the funding of Islamic terror. Raids on March 20 struck an extraordinary array of financial, charitable, and ostensibly religious entities…
The Marriage Problem How Our Culture Has Weakened Families by James Q. Wilson HarperCollins, 274 pp., $25.95 IN "The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families," the eminent social scientist James Q. Wilson sets out to offer an explanation deeper than "the Sixties" for the…
THERE ARE ONLY a few things that take me back to Milwaukee, my hometown. And except for bowling, moon boots, and watching bad football on metal bleachers in subzero temperatures, they're all comestible. A Usinger's bratwurst. Frozen custard. A 2 lb. block of sharp cheddar just like the ones Mom…
IF YOU WANT to understand American popular culture, you have to read Daily Variety.
MILTON BERLE attended many funerals at Hillside Cemetery here in Los Angeles over the years for his brethren. This is "brethren" in two senses. Hillside is a Jewish cemetery and, in case you didn't know or couldn't guess, Berle was a Jew. Also, though, most of these funerals were for a subset of…
THE BRUTALIST bourgeoisophobia of the Islamic extremists is pretty straightforward. The attitudes of European etherealists are quite a bit more complicated. Europeans, of course, are bourgeois themselves, even more so in some ways than Americans and Israelis. What they distrust about America and…
U.N. SECRETARY GENERAL Kofi Annan is happy with President Bush's apparent Middle East policy switch. So is European Union president Romano Prodi, French president Jacques Chirac, and the British foreign ministry. The New York Times editorial page is very happy. And, really, that's what American…
Part 5 in a 5 part series.
Part 4 in a 5 part series.
SEPTEMBER 11 started something: a new conversation about freedom. No doubt philosophers in their conclaves have been at this all along, but suddenly Americans more generally are being invited to refurbish our views about the core of our heritage.
Sponsored by the Project for the New American Century: April 3, 2002 The Honorable George W. Bush President of the United States Washington, DC Dear Mr. President: We write to thank you for your courageous leadership in the war on terrorism and to offer our full support as you continue to protect…
IN A CLASSIC episode of the "Twilight Zone," a woman driving cross-country by herself keeps encountering a sinister-looking hitchhiker. No matter how fast she drives, no matter how many extra hours she travels at night, somehow, the hitchhiker manages to catch up with her--he reappears again and…
Part 3 in a 5 part series.
Part 2 in a 5 part series.
ALOFT, on a plane headed for San Francisco, reading the early pages of the excellent biography of the Sanskrit scholar Max Muller by Nirad C. Chaudhuri, I came across the following item about life in the ducal city of Dessau in Germany, where Muller was born in 1823: "One thing which helped the…
One hundred and sixteen years ago Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced Western civilization ready to move "Beyond Good and Evil," the famous title of his last major book. George W. Bush begs to differ. In so doing, he has reopened one of the great controversies of modern times. We are, says Bush, engaged…
Campaign finance reform could have been a lot worse. In 1994, both houses of Congress passed legislation banning soft money, slapping tight restrictions on independent issue ads, and mandating partial public financing of House and Senate races. Only a filibuster that blocked the naming of Senate…
NOT SINCE Secretary of State Warren Christopher returned from Europe with egg on his face in May 1993 has a high-ranking American official had such a bad week abroad as Vice President Dick Cheney just spent in the Middle East. At least that's the way it looks from the outside. Christopher, you'll…
The Natural The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton by Joe Klein Doubleday, 230 pp., $22.95 PERHAPS the only thing worse than a really bad love affair is a love affair that isn't quite bad enough--that strings one along with hopes, promises much while delivering little, and ends in confusion…
IT IS HARD not to admire Yasser Arafat. He is certainly the most successful terrorist of modern Middle Eastern history. Always entrepreneurial, he has repeatedly bounced back from oblivion by deftly merging headline-grabbing terrorism with the Arab world's unhappy and unrequited national and…
FREE SPEECH, fair process, and judicial independence are under assault in Massachusetts. What makes the attack peculiarly insidious is that it is being led by the commonwealth's highest court. Unavoidably, courts must occasionally rule in cases involving alleged judicial misconduct. In such cases,…
AMARGOSA VALLEY, NEVADA Standing behind the counter at Nevada Joe's, a gas station and saloon along Highway 95 northwest of Las Vegas, Adrian Goodman explains his decision to move from Los Angeles to the middle of nowhere. "I basically wanted to get as far away as possible from people," he says. "I…
MAKING THE 1957 film "Sweet Smell of Success" was an unhappy experience with parlous consequences for many of those involved. Its director, Alexander Mackendrick, was traumatized by his confrontations with its star and co-producer, the gargantuan Burt Lancaster--who threatened Mackendrick bodily…
BLOOD LIBEL II In last week's issue, The Scrapbook printed extended excerpts from an astounding essay published in the March 10 edition of the Saudi newspaper Al-Riyadh. That essay, written by a faculty member at King Faisal University, purported to detail the precise recipe and technique Jewish…
JERUSALEM VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY'S surprise offer to meet with Yasser Arafat on condition that Arafat "showed a 100 percent effort" to stop terror was the biggest news story of March 19. But just 12 hours later, a suicide bombing ripped apart an Israeli bus, murdering seven civilians and…
MANY A bone-dry political science disquisition has by now been written about the institutional combat between White House and Congress during the first year of the Bush administration. Our current president is a man who seems especially determined to protect the authority and prerogatives of his…
Harry & Ike The Partnership that Remade the Postwar World by Steve Neal Scribner, 324 pp., $26 "HARRY & IKE," Steve Neal's book on the relations between Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, might well have had a second subtitle--"Great Presidents Behaving Badly." It tells two stories. The first is…
THOSE ENERGY lobbyists are a lame bunch. They are lavishly funded by the oil industry. They get to work in fancy institutes and have open dining at The Palm. And look at how little influence they actually have on the Bush energy plan. Here's the biggest piece of legislation of the decade for them.…
Editor's Note: One of my colleagues jokes that the five deadliest words in journalism are "Part 1 in a series." Well, not this time. This week we'll be featuring Matt Labash's investigate report on red light cameras and even though it's a series, you won't want to miss it.